Sliced almonds

One US cup of sliced almonds weighs 92 grams. Going the other way, 100 grams is about 1.09 cups.

Also called flaked almonds, sliced blanched almonds.

Sliced almonds are whole blanched almonds passed through a slicing machine that produces thin flat pieces, typically about a millimetre thick and the full width of the nut. They are the lightest of the three common almond preparations, per cup, because the flat pieces stack with the largest air gaps.

USDA FoodData Central (FDC 170567, Nuts, almonds) publishes portion measurements for whole, sliced, slivered and ground almonds from the same underlying nutrient record. The sliced portion is 92 grams per cup, implying a density of 0.3889 g/mL on the US customary cup of 236.5882365 mL. King Arthur publishes 86 grams for the same preparation, implying 0.3635 g/mL. The gap between the two is 7.0%, comfortably inside the 10% tolerance this site applies to milled and packed-piece ingredients, so both figures are accepted and the USDA figure is published as the site's primary value.

The density difference between sliced and slivered almonds is a useful teaching case. Whole almonds pack at 143 g per cup because the almond shape is roughly uniform and the nuts nest against each other reasonably tightly. Slivered almonds, cut into elongated stick shapes, pack at 108 g per cup because the slivers stack randomly with more air between them. Sliced almonds pack at only 92 g per cup because the flat wafer shape traps the most air of the three. Same nut, three preparations, three different cup weights, all with the same source per gram of nutrition. The cup measurement reflects the geometry of the pieces, not the density of the material.

In British English the same preparation is often called 'flaked almonds' rather than sliced, and recipes from British sources use that term for the identical product. American 'sliced' and British 'flaked' are interchangeable.

This entry is specifically for the standard sliced-almond preparation, which is almost always blanched (skin removed) before slicing because the skin fragments would produce an unsightly product. It does not cover almond flour or almond meal, which are ground finer and packed at different densities (see the almond-flour entry); slivered almonds, which are elongated sticks with their own separate entry; or whole almonds, which have their own entry at 143 g per cup. Toasted sliced almonds have the same weight as untoasted, since toasting removes only a small percentage of water.

The confidence grade is medium because two independent sources agree within tolerance and both are widely used references, but no third source at a higher tier (a standards body or an independent bench measurement) confirms the figure. High confidence will require a third independent measurement.